What I have to offer you today should more properly occupy a full year course sequence of several lectures a week and will consequently be disjointed, lumpy and inadequately documented. I make no apology, however, for these shortcomings, as I believe that the circumstances justify the means by which I will try to communicate to you several major generalizations with respect to communication and control involving humans and their computer implemented surrogates that become prosthetic extensions of ourselves and our community. How often will I have an opportunity to address a sample of the key representatives in various capacities of a front rank computing organization such as IBM, immersed in the expertise of a success enterprise, yet susceptible to the limitations of technological inbreeding, a case in real life of ontological recapitulation of phylogeny? We, too, can travel on a wave of success into oblivion as have so many other animals, societies, and systems.
Recognizing that humans change only very slowly as a species, while they as organisms undergo tremendous changes due to surrounding scientific, technical and social revolution and readjustment, I would like to have us look at ourselves as prototypes of the past 40 year human generation 1938 -1978 and to use ordinary extrapolation techniques on that picture to give us clear 20-20 vision.
Education may come relatively quickly, but wisdom comes slowly, at a high price, and sometimes never. I vividly recall receiving a copy of a short essay by the Russian physiologist—psychologist Pavlov that was distributed to the attendees of the International Physiological Congress in Moscow during the thirties. It was in simulated illuminated manuscript form, translated into English for us illiterates and admonished us to learn the principle of “gradualness” in human affairs. It suggested that scientifically proven truth became established and accepted truth, on which human progress could be made, only after it had been stated, restated, tested, and retested over a period of years.
I was impatient then, just as I am impatient now, with waiting for science
and technology to get on with the job, but I am forced to admit the wisdom of
Pavlov‘s gradualness principle. It does not say that we need to wait for evolution
to bring progress; instead it reminds us that we are pounding on the wrong door
when we scold at present day science for refusing to adopt new ideas that we
present with proof. We must put these new ideas through the long ritual of repetition,
prototype feasibility demonstration, even deliberate campaigns to get the new
ideas stolen and reinvented.
If we will take our scientific and engineering personalities out of the clouds of “logical proof” and attend to the nitty gritty business of “selling” advanced scientific insight, we will have made a discovery that will shock many of us who live in academic or engineering towers, that I suppose should now be of ivory and polymeric plastic respectively. We will have discovered marketing, a procedure that simply does not exist for most of science, medicine and social science.
The dynamics of this process of discovering manifest truth are startling in their time constants. I have confirmed by direct experiment, utilizing “tag” neologisms or symbology, that really new and significantly unconventional insights require 15 to 20 years for acceptance, while those utilizing already ploughed ground of mathematical theory or electronic art take typically 10 years.
This time course needs reconciliation with the MTBF (mean time between failures - or promotions) of the typical “manager” level employee in industry, especially large scale industry. When I consulted with the General Electric Company in their considerations of whether to enter the electronic-computer medical instrtxmentation field in a major way some years ago, we realized that quick turnaround in policy with continued systematic initiative can more easily be achieved in a small organization whose interests and product line can then be “bought” or annexed by a large organization to the mutual benefit of both parties.
Let me illustrate with a personal example. In 1937 I wrote a Ph.D. thesis utilizing an iterative analog real time on-line non-linear transmission line computer to simulate the living nerve axon and to study the effect of parametric adjustment of metabolic, electrical and structural coefficients via the simulation computer. It worked well and allowed us to imitate the behavior of widely different biological structures from the plant cell nitella that sports a conducted action potential, to the frog nerve, to the crab fiber, to the then newly discovered giant squid axon.
My postdoctoral chief in London at University College, Professor A. V. Hill,
Nobel prize winner and Secretary of the Royal Society, tried to get this thesis
published in the Royal Society Proceedings and was turned down on the basis
that it was not really honest physiology, mathematics, or electronics, but a
hopeless mix of all three stirred into a thing called a “computer“ that obviously
was mere wishful thinking. A few pieces of that technology did sell, however,
but under different management. The trigger circuit that assured the non-vacillating
certainty of the all-or-nothing property of the nerve was found to have some
use in subsequent computers; the emitter-follower that minimized back loading
in iterative elements is now somewhat used; and even the common-emitter differential
amplifier has uses.
By the mischance of discovering a mathematical error in Hill's development of a Bessel Function description of muscle heat flow, I received, instead of an expected scolding for insolence, a semi permanent guest card to the Wednesday meetings of the Royal Society where I heard some of the last words of Ernest Rutherford in defense of the electron; the prehistory of radar; Sigmund Freud, already mortally ill, on the strange half-science of psychiatry; and even Neville Chamberlain upon his triumphal return from Germany with guarantees of “Peace in our times” who had to be made an honorary member of the Society, but was told peremptorily, when he started to orate, that no speech was required.
Now all of this preamble is intended to get you into a mood for examining computer projections for coming years, without instantly rejecting them as ridiculous or counter to accepted present practice. Criticize them vigorously, if you will, on the basis of their logic or their technical feasibility or their human utility. Do not reject them, however, on the basis of contemporary computer dogma and usage. Did you, twenty years ago, expect to see raw sex on the public movie screen, or the United States displaced as the world leader in electronics, automation technology or computer science?
I will offer today seven areas of computer-involved technology and application where I believe we have the tools and the know-how, but not the social acceptance within the computer science field or outside it in the public domain, to put the concept into wide scale operation - hopefully at a profit - to the industry and to the recipient of the service.
Here I should perhaps pause for a moment to remind you of the reality of the “Readers Digest Effect”. You all know the semi-scientific layman's language reports of new devices, medications and researches that appear in mass media like Readers Digest, Psychology Today, etc., etc. A more sophisticated version of these advanced science reports for the layman appears in journals like Scientific American. Very often these articles, that would be pooh poohed by the professional, come back to him for reexamination from the lay public, the patient to his doctor, the merchant to his computer service, the dissatisfied taxpayer to his all-wise representative legislators. Upon forced reexamination there is often real merit in these ideas or their revised counterparts. Is it unprofessional to plant a few of these mass media ideas in those cases where the professional cannot see innovation by virtue of his own professional preconditioning?
In choosing these topics I want to include some solid, immediately approachable
features along with more spicy possibilities. Certainly I will emphasize biologically,
medically, sociologically directed items because of my biophysical interests,
but I sincerely believe that we are entering the phase of algorithmic quantitation
in life sciences just as we entered corresponding phases in physical science
some years ago.
The ideas that I would like to present, and that we can perhaps develop during the discussion, I will now list. Originally I had hoped to have these liberally documented with figures and tables, but the logistics and timing are against such a presentation. If you are interested, I can carry out further detailed development with you individually, here or at some future time. The list includes the following:
1) The development of a generation of computers requiring no visible programmers.
2) Computers utilizing humans as sub-system components and designed meta-languages.
3) System design of a multi-level computer-implemented personally portable whole life medical record.
4) Computers for the implementation of home medical health maintenance diagnosis and therapy.
5) The concept of an intimately incorporated human test and interactive communication computer port.
6) Computer-assisted optimization as a replacement for adversary binary decision process in law, regulatory ordinances, health acceptable risk and implementation of Santosha index procedures.
7) Popular transponsive telecommunication terminals in the implementation of public policy and decision making.
Note: The material presented orally under the preceding seven headings was drawn substantially from concepts I have developed and examined in our internal Biophysical. Sciences seminar series and in part from already reported or published material. Copies of several of the pertinent source outlines and reprints are enclosed.
In conclusion I would like to urge the development of a computer industry analog of the armed services war colleges. Whether that should be shared or proprietary, I do not know; certainly we have not gone far in academia or government in developing this class of pragmatic think-tank and mental jogging.
Ideally this process should be shared three ways as was the original services
design in Japan now being vigorously imitated and improved in West Germany,
Holland, and to a lesser extent in other West European nations. What is going
on in the Soviet Union along these lines I have only a vague notion. Perhaps
before we leave today we can plant seeds for the deliberate stimulation of creative
planning and prototype exploration in advance of mass production.